Question

Over the years I have vacillated between having my project/source folders in a directory one level removed from the root (e.g. D:\Projects) and keeping them in the default location for Visual Studio.

In the past, I resisted storing anything in the various “My Documents” folders established by Win 95, Win 98, and XP. I finally switched to storing them in the Documents folder since Vista shortened the path and I got tired of changing default directories for my dev tools. However, now I find myself leaning toward creating a folder off root again since I am setting up a new machine.

I get tired of the long paths you have to navigate to when stuff is stored in the documents folders. Also, I don’t backup source code and database files like I do with my other documents since I use a VCS for source code. However, it seems you are always fighting to maintain a “non-standard” source location since every dev tool generally wants to store stuff in a subfolder of documents.

I would like to hear other’s opinions on this subject.

Answer 1

I think it depends on your use… I prefer to have my development projects on a separate drive/partition, so will usually use the following convention D:\projects\{company-name}\({client-name}|internal)\{project-name} Where the client-name comes into play is when the work is by a given company, but for another. I keep my projects under D:\projects\personal\... This allows for a better structure.

As to backup strategies, imho this is what source control is for. I prefer subversion, and have a backup strategy for the svn server. Although I didn’t much care for ankh 1.x, the 2.x version, along with TortoiseSVN have worked pretty well for me. As a matter of practice, I tend to checkin often, and try to only checkin code in a runnable state (though new features/code may not work).